Quirks of Memory

Alcohol can weaken attention, judgment, and the formation of new memories even when a person does not experience a blackout. The article explains that intoxicated witnesses often recall fewer details, while research does not find that the details they do report are generally less accurate; it also discusses suggestibility, sober follow-up interviews, and limits on estimating one’s intoxication.

This overview describes how Alzheimer’s disease progressively affects episodic memory for personally experienced events, the kind of memory often involved in witness testimony. It reviews evidence that recent-event recall and recognition become impaired, while some remote or emotionally salient memories may be relatively preserved, and explains why reliability and competency require an individualized assessment of disease stage and the memory at issue.

This overview explains how an initial reference value or suggestive wording can pull a witness’s estimates of speed, distance, height, duration, or other quantities toward an anchor. It reviews experiments showing that question wording can alter numerical estimates and related recollections, and it describes why precise-sounding testimony may still be approximate and sensitive to how the question was asked.

This overview distinguishes inattentional blindness, in which an unexpected visible event goes unnoticed, from change blindness, in which a change between views is missed. It reviews experiments involving unexpected events and person substitutions, explaining how selective attention can lead honest witnesses both to miss something that was present and to misidentify someone they believe they saw.

This paper explains childhood amnesia, the scarcity of adults’ episodic memories from the first years of life, and how its boundary changes with development. It reviews possible explanations and discusses the careful, probabilistic use of this research when evaluating claims about memories of very early events.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that support an existing expectation. The article explains how this bias can shape investigations and forensic judgments, including interpretation of ambiguous evidence, and describes safeguards such as blind testing, documenting information exposure, and independent review.

Consistency bias leads people to remember their past attitudes and feelings as more like their current views than they actually were. The article describes how memory reconstructs earlier beliefs, emotions, and relationships in light of the present, and explains why a witness’s sincere claim that an opinion never changed may differ from contemporaneous records.

Context can shape how memories are formed and later retrieved, making recall easier when relevant features of the original setting are reinstated. The article also explains that contextual information can bias forensic judgments, and discusses both context-reinstatement interviewing and procedures that shield examiners from irrelevant case details.

Cryptomnesia occurs when a person recalls previously encountered information but mistakes it for a new idea or personal observation. The article reviews research on unconscious plagiarism and explains how source-monitoring failures may lead a witness to report information learned from another person, an investigator, or media coverage as something directly seen.

This overview describes dissociation as a range of experiences involving disruptions in the integration of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception, and reviews how researchers measure it. It summarizes mixed research linking higher dissociation with susceptibility to misinformation or false memory, emphasizing that the evidence is correlational and variable and that a dissociation score cannot determine whether a particular memory is true or false.

Egocentric bias is the tendency to remember one’s own role in shared events more readily or favorably than other people’s roles. The article reviews research on memory for contributions, fairness, and consensus, and explains how this ordinary bias can shape sincere accounts of disputes, negotiations, and other events involving multiple participants.

Information encountered after an event can alter how a witness remembers it, even when the witness is sincere. The article surveys sources of memory distortion such as media, conversations with co-witnesses, suggestive interviews, photographs, and repeated retellings, and explains how these influences can change both reported details and confidence.

Fading affect bias describes how the emotional force of unpleasant autobiographical memories tends to diminish faster than the warmth attached to positive memories. The article explains that this change concerns remembered feelings rather than factual content, and discusses how mood, rehearsal, and elapsed time affect its relevance to witness demeanor and recalled distress.

This paper reviews whether trauma exposure or PTSD is associated with greater susceptibility to false memories and suggestion in controlled laboratory studies, reporting mixed evidence of modest increases for some tasks. It also describes research showing that central features of traumatic events may be well retained and cautions that laboratory results cannot establish whether any individual account of a real event is true or false.

Intellectual disability can affect reasoning, learning, and adaptive behavior, but it does not by itself make a witness either reliable or unreliable. This overview explains that people with mild intellectual disabilities often give accurate but less complete accounts in open-ended free recall, while closed, leading, or repeated questions can increase acquiescence and errors.

This overview explains that ADHD-related memory difficulties are linked especially to attention, working memory, and the controlled processes used to retrieve information, rather than to a global loss of memory. It reviews findings that basic learning and recognition may be relatively intact while open-ended recall can contain gaps or intrusions, and it discusses the implications for witness accounts, interviewing, and the evaluation of contested confessions.

This article describes the reminiscence bump, the disproportionate number of autobiographical memories people report from adolescence and early adulthood, and examines evidence that its onset is associated with puberty. It discusses identity formation, cultural life expectations, and developing memory systems, while cautioning that broad lifespan patterns cannot establish what a particular person remembers.